Nationality: United StatesExecutive summary: Kelly Kapoor on The Office

Mindy Kaling was a writer and producer for NBC's The Office, and played Kelly Kapoor, the ditzy but not dumb young woman in Dunder-Mifflin's Scranton office. She now stars in her own sit-com, The Mindy Project. She keeps her romantic life out of the public eye, but is known to have dated Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd: The Story of My People.

At Dartmouth she drew the comic "Badly Drawn Girl" for the college paper, and she performed with the improv group Dog Day Players. She briefly worked as a production assistant on Crossing Over with John Edward, then co-wrote and starred as Ben Affleck in the off-Broadway play Matt & Ben, which ran for ten months in 2003-04. TV producer Greg Daniels loved the play and hired her to write for The Office, and she was the primary writer for more than a dozen episodes.

She started appearing on-camera on The Office when the show needed a minority woman to slap Steve Carell in the face for racially insensitive remarks in the first-season episode "Diversity Day". In Kaling's third-season episode "Diwali", introducing the Indian holiday to her co-workers, her parents were played by her real parents, who are both Indian immigrants to America.